


we're all stories in the end; some of us are epics

by coffeesuperhero



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-07
Updated: 2011-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero/pseuds/coffeesuperhero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is both delightful and heartbreaking, knowing what River knows, when she knows it, how she knows it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're all stories in the end; some of us are epics

**Author's Note:**

> **Original Prompt** : Anything on River's thoughts on knowing Amy and Rory are her parents when they don't know.  
>  **Notes** : This isn't for profit, just for the fun of [Ladies Fest](http://ladies-fest.livejournal.com/profile). All characters & situations belong to Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, BBC, and their various subsidiaries. Spoilers for everything current, just in case. Thanks to [leiascully](http://leiascully.livejournal.com/profile) for looking this over!

Time travel is a funny thing, River knows. It makes strange things happen. There is, for example, an urban legend in the fifty-first century about a man who wasn't careful enough and wound up becoming his own grandfather.

This isn't that story, but it is a story about time travel.

This is almost, but not quite, the story about the girl with the curls all in the middle of her forehead. This particular lady has plenty of curls, and underneath them she has a brain that works at superhuman speed, and she carries her own gun. She wouldn't really be very much at home in a nursery rhyme, especially not a nursery rhyme that tried to do anything as restrictive as box her in to boring notions of _good_ and _bad_. How dreadfully dull.

River Song is too magnificent for all that. And besides, anybody who writes such things probably subscribes to the theory that lying is, categorically, bad, and she cannot see it that way, not when the truth could unravel her future and change her parents' histories.

River doesn't really mind lying. She quite enjoys it, which is just as well, since she finds she must do so, early and often.

This is a story about families.

The scene is this: a woman sits in a booth at a roadside cafe in Utah, United States of America, Earth, twenty-first century. Her father sits next to her, looking at her curiously as she reminisces with her husband over their holiday travels, while across the table her mother listens with fond amusement. It's a perfectly typical family get-together, except, of course, that it isn't: mother and father don't know they have a daughter, and the girl with the curls and the clever brain and the gun of her own is the only one of the three of them who has any idea how that part of the story will go, and she isn't saying a word. She can't, not yet.

It is both delightful and heartbreaking, knowing what River knows, when she knows it, how she knows it. It's delightful, because River, after the fashion of Time Lords generally and almost-but-not-quite Time Lords specifically, is always delighted to know what other people do not, and further delighted, in manner of all precocious children, to know what her parents do not, even if it means that they do not know her.

Later, for her parents, and earlier, for her, the scene will shift and change, no longer a roadside cafe decorated with cheesy Americana, but a quiet bedroom in Leadworth, United Kingdom, still on Earth, still in the twenty-first century. She will lounge on her mother's bed and watch her parents ever so agonizingly slowly realize, with a bit of help from her, that they are in love, and so she will, in a way, ensure her own conception, one of these years.

It's not every child who gets to be even tangentially responsible for her own existence, or leave her parents a wedding gift before she manages to get herself born.

The heartbreak comes from carrying the weight of this knowledge, and she lacks the extra heart she sometimes feels she might need to fuel her body so it can shoulder all of this grief. But she tries not to dwell on that overly much, though it does catch her up, very occasionally, when she is off her guard.

The truth of this story is fairly simple. There are days when they are Mum and Dad, and there are days when they are Amy and Rory. Sometimes it is difficult to tell which one they will be.

So, for example: a father comes to visit his daughter on her birthday. It's just one more perfectly typical family moment, but mix in a little time travel and it's usual no longer.

River stands in the corridor outside her cell, waiting, hoping, but from his point of view, today, he's not her father, he's Rory, Rory the Roman, Rory the Last Centurion, the man her mother told her stories about when she was very small, the man who waited two-thousand years by a block of stone so that he could see her mother again. There's a love story and no mistake. She is proud to be their daughter, these brave, clever, stubborn people. She is no less proud to be theirs in the moments when they do not know her than she is in the moments they do.

It requires a certain talent for acting and flair for the dramatic, to live a lie the way she lives it when they do not know her, and most days, heartbreak or no, it is a part she approaches with relish. She is, after all, an archaeologist: she loves history, both reading about it and observing it, and no less so when it is her own.

She watches them do brilliant, impossible things; she hugs her mother, who has never yet had children, and tells her that she is amazing. She pretends not to recognize her father, but she confides in him all the same.

At some point in this story, they will finally know everything, and she will stop pretending. One sunny summer afternoon, she will drop out of the sky on a day when they do know her, and she and her mother will sit in the garden and drink wine and tell stories, and after awhile, her mother will grow quite serious and apologise for a terrible night in a warehouse in Florida in the 1960's when she aimed a gun at a little girl in a spacesuit, desperate to save her best friend's life.

This isn't the happiest of stories, but when your life spreads out over space and time the way hers does, you're bound to have a little sadness, now and again.

The little girl in the spacesuit knows her mummy, but her mummy does not know her. The little girl will grow up, though, and a face or two later, she will drink that glass of wine and say to her mother, "I understand."

She'll linger as long as she can. It may be a bit of fun now and again, knowing them while they know nothing of her, but it's just as splendid to live in the days when they do, all of them living and loving in the same time for as many precious moments as they can spare.

Eventually, of course, she'll have to flit back to her own century. This is still a story about time travel. And she'll sit in her cell, the rain pelting down outside the prison walls, and her parents, whether they know her or not, will no longer be, and yet, somewhere out there in time, they still are. She will write out the stories of their time together, recording with an archaeologist's precision all the days where they knew her, the days where they didn't, the days that delighted her, and the days that broke her heart.

Time travel is a funny thing, River knows. It can take one simple little family history and make it last for centuries longer than it might have otherwise, stretching out all their stories. That's no urban legend. That is her life; that is her story.


End file.
